(Named one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of 2010) When Ann Beattie began publishing short stories in The New Yorker in the mid-1970s, her voice was so original, so uncannily prescient in its assessment of her characters' drift and narcissism, that she was instantly celebrated as a voice of her generation. Each Beattie story, says Margaret Atwood, is "like a fresh bulletin from the front: we snatch it up, eager to know what's happening out there on the edge of that shifting and dubious no-man's-land known as interpersonal relations." As seen in this collection, Beattie's characters have moved over the decades from lives of fickle desire to the burdens and inhibitions of adulthood and on to failed aspirations, sloppy divorces, and sometimes enlightenment, even grace.

"As much as anyone in the past 50 years—you give me your Mavis Gallant, I'll give you my Frank O'Connor—Ann Beattie's slow-forming monument of a lifework defines what the short story can do, the extent of human life it can encompass."—Jonathan Lethem